Category: Technology

There appears to be a common issue affecting a number of Galaxy S8 users, whereby the person on the other end of a voice call cannot hear any sounds coming from the S8 owner. I was also affected by this issue, and nothing seemed to resolve it (although admittedly I was too hesitant to try a factory reset – given others already claimed this did not resolve it for them).

For me, the issue only occurred when I was connected to my home network. Playing around with relevant WiFi related features, I discovered the issue went away when I disabled Wi-Fi calling.

This is a bit of an old topic; I recently, after reinstalling Windows, had to reconfigure my local client to allow passing windows keyboard shortcuts through to my Citrix instance. In this case, I was using remote desktop as a Citrix application. I have noticed that Citrix Desktops don’t seem to have this same issue. Since it took a bit of digging to find out how to configure this, again, I thought I would put it here as a reminder and to help other should they run across the same issue.

Open regedit (press the windows key
and type “regedit” sans quotes) on the client device.

Having changed to a 64-bit development machine at work recently I ran into an Oracle error while trying to generate files using CodeSmith. This error was ORA-06413: Connection Not Open. Assuming it was a connection string error, as I had not run this particular generation in some time and it was likely that the server or username/password had changed, I proceeded to test the connection from SQL Developer. Success!

After ruling out that the connection was indeed valid I did a quick Google search for the error message. After a few clicks I discovered a very well known (has been around for a few years) Oracle issue; When executing an Oracle command from an application with parentheses or equals — ‘(‘ or ’)’ or ‘=’ — in the path than the specified error message is thrown.

In this particular case, CodeSmith had been installed under C:/Program Files (x86)/CodeSmith which was causing Oracle to fail. The quickest workaround was to simply move CodeSmith from the Program Files (x86) path e.g. into C:/CodeSmith. However; there is a patch (5383042) for Oracle 10g, which is also applied to Oracle 11G.

What is it?

The Australian Federal Government is introducing a mandatory ISP-level filtering of all Refused Classification (RC) rated content. This means all websites (or part thereof) which have been refused classification under Australia’s classification laws will be blacklisted.

See the Electronic Frontiers Open Internet website for more information.

As a lot of people are probably already aware iiNet was taken to court by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) for allegedly allowing its customers to illegally download copyrighted material (e.g. movies, music, etc).

This morning Justice Cowdroy has ruled in favour of iiNet stating that “I find that iiNet simply can’t be seen as approving infringement”. His verdict was that the “copyright (infringement) occurred as result of use of BitTorrent, not the Internet” and that “iiNet has no control over (the) BitTorrent system and (is) not responsible for (the) BitTorrent system.”

For those of you ‘lucky’ enough to have already updated to the new Windows 7 then you have probably already noticed the major changes to the task bar. Good or bad, you decide. Personally, I like some of the new functionality that it provides but I also enjoy a slim taskbar — similar to that of Vista. Fortunately, Microsoft provided a “Use small icons” option in the taskbar properties (right-click the taskbar and select properties) which makes the task bar a similar size to that of Vista.

Changing the taskbar to use small icons, however, does not fix the fact that Windows Live Messenger likes to constantly take up space in the taskbar even when the window is not open. Since there does not currently appear to be an option in Windows Live Messenger to display the program in the system tray, instead of on the taskbar, we need to use a simple work around.

First, close any current Windows Live Messenger instances. Then open your start menu and locate the Windows Live Messenger shortcut. Right-click the shortcut and select Properties. Switch to the Compatibility tab and check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and select Window Vista (Service Pack 2)”. Now start Windows Live Messenger and problem solved. You should now see the Windows Live Messenger icon in the system tray. As you would on Vista, XP, etc.

ONE of the best features built-into the HTC Touch HD would have to be the weather module. This module allows you to view the current weather conditions, as well as a four-day forecast and all in a pretty cool looking interface. However; for some unknown reason Telstra decided to disable the weather module by default, instead opting to include a bunch of somewhat completely useless modules of its own.

There is good news… through a bit of editing you are able to re-enable the weather module and, if you desire, remove the unnecessary Telstra modules. First thing is first; we need to find the file which contains the HTC Touch Flow configuration. The file we are after is 26948339_manila.xml which is located in the Windows directory. Back this original file up. Copy this file on to your storage card, or somewhere you can access it from your computer (alternative you could use an application such as Total Commander to edit the file from your mobile device).

Using Recovery Console

The standard and recommended way to repair your boot.ini is to boot to your Windows installation CD and through the recovery console perform a repair on the boot config. This can be done by calling bootcfg /rebuild, however, this requires you to have administrative privileges for the Windows installation that you are attempting to fix. As I recently discovered this may not always be the case, luckily I remembered my good friend Knoppix.

Knoppix is a free Linux bootable Live CD. It allows you to boot to a fully functional Linux system, without having to perform an install or without any other permanent effects.

Using Knoppix

This workaround allows you to fix the boot.ini file, without requiring administrative privileges, however in order to be able to boot to Knoppix you will need to be able to boot from your CD drive.